A Perpetual Motion Scapegoating Machine
How the Deep Right is Coopting Conspiracy Consciousness, Part Two
(Audio version for paid subscribers at end of the piece.)
Project 2025 and Curtis Yarvin’s RAGE Machine
“Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.” —Peter Thiel
Project 2025, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” is a 900-page document from the Heritage Foundation that has been loosely described (by “woke-MSM”) as “a blueprint for a second Trump administration.”
While it is currently doing the rounds in the mainstream media, helping to whip up Trump-Derangement Syndrome on “the left,” I have no plans to try to read the damn thing. But neither does Trump, allegedly, having disavowed any association with it. From July 5th:
The TDS-sufferers on “the right” are following their emperor’s example and calling it a disinformation hoax, although the document definitely exists (and was not created by Radical Left Dems). It has a foreword by Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president and a Project 2025 leader. Roberts is also releasing what sounds like a more popularized version of it later this year, timed with the election: Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.
(Without having read either document, it does bring to mind how Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy served as a streamlined, simplified, and immensely popular version of the infamous 1974 SRI Changing Images of Man document for social engineering).
Roberts’ book also includes a foreword by J.D Vance; so where there is smoke, there is also fire.
According to the ultra-woke New Republic, in an article by Gil Duran currently doing the rounds (“Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas”), Project 2025 “calls for firing an estimated 500,000 federal employees and dismantling entire agencies.” This, as the piece makes clear, is roughly the same plan as Curtis Yarvin’s RAGE (Retire All Government Employees), a plan that has been tossed about on social media since at least 2012, when Yarvin gave a speech (“How to Reboot the US Government”) that included the famous line, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”
Most of this seems reasonably substantiated, though one never knows except by going to the source itself, such as this from https://www.project2025.org/truth/:
De-Weaponize the Federal Government and Dismantle the Deep State. Project 2025’s policy reforms would restore self-governance to the American people by: Firing supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats. Closing wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices. Eliminating woke propaganda at every level of government. Restoring the American people’s Constitutional authority over the administrative state. Returning governing power to the Congress and President instead of unelected bureaucrats.
Durn also claims J.D. Vance has been named as the executor of the plan, and Vanity Fair confirms that Vance, if not the designated executioner, has at least proposed it to Trump: “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Invoking the Antichrist (Enter Lex Luthor)
“Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that.” —Blake Masters, 2021
In terms of numbers cited by Durn, they may not be exaggerated. From the American Federation of Government Employees website: “Because of the proposed deep budget cuts, elimination and privatization of agencies and programs, hiring freezes, caps on the number of personnel, and other anti-government policies, some have estimated that there would be a loss of up to a million federal jobs if Project 2025 is implemented” (July 15, 2024).
So is firing DEI (diversity equity inclusion) staff and “woke” enforcers of CRT (critical race theory) really on the cards for 2025? There’s definite evidence for it outside the pipe dreams of the dissident right and supposed leftist disinfo: the leading CRT theorist Robin DiAngelo was denounced last week for plagiarizing minority writers (yes, really).
Of course, Trump-deranged paranoia of the progressive “left” (that if elected, Trump will become the next Hitler and plunder, rape, and pillage US society) is fed by articles like Durn’s; or by Robert Reich’s op-ed for UK’s the Guardian last Friday: “Elon Musk is out of control. Here is how to rein him in (He may be the richest man in the world—but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless to stop him).” Reich’s essay overflows with the left’s special brand of gut-churning, anti-disinfo disinfo, including passages like this:
Evidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents are using X to disrupt this year’s presidential race, presumably in favor of Trump. Musk has done little to stop them. Meanwhile, Musk is supporting rightwing causes around the world. In the UK, far-right thugs burned, looted and terrorized minority communities as Musk’s X spread misinformation about a deadly attack on schoolgirls. Musk not only allowed instigators of this hate to spread these lies, but he retweeted and supported them.
Robert Reich was once Bill Clinton’s labor secretary (whatever that is), as well as an early leading proponent for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), i.e, a globalist. Since I wrote this, he has publicly called for Musk’s arrest. This is neatly timed with Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian minister of the Supreme Federal Court, banning X (and VPNs) in Brazil, which some claim is a trial balloon for Reich’s dream, and that, if successful, X will then be banned in the EU and elsewhere.
Can it really be coincidental that de Moraes looks like Lex Luthor?
So who does that make Elon Musk?
It is extremely hard not to want to take sides with team Thiel-Musk-Trump-Kennedy 2025, when forced to swallow this sort of regurgitated vomit from “the left.” And this is very much my point, and why I bother to include all of this here, in the hope of fending off “arguments” like “a Harris ‘win’ would be much worse,” etc., etc., which is exactly what people are being perception-managed to say and think.
There is never an excuse for election hysteria, much less for idiotic re-spins of reality such as Reich’s claim: “Musk reposted a faked version of Kamala Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like Harris,” when the video in question is so obviously a parody that calling it fake news only exposes the craven dementia of these “never-Trumpers.”
This sort of TDS hysteria is itself the perfect way to invalidate more sober, informed concerns about what Trump 2.0 might actually mean, concerns that are justified by plans like Project 2025, insofar as they exist—and they appear to.
On the other side of the “grey mirror” (the name of Yarvis’ current substack), meanwhile, there is the paranoia of the conservative “right,” who seem to be undergoing their own form of derangement, as vocalized by Blake Masters (a venture capitalist and part of team Thiel-Vance-Trump) to IM-1776 in 2021:
Progressives today are not just motivated by their hatred of their fellow Americans who disagree with them; they’re motivated by their hatred for America itself, and the very idea of a sovereign nation. If it takes root and becomes universal, the globalist ideology ultimately leads to the One World State, call it “Global Communism.” So in my view that ideology is a pretty good candidate for the Antichrist. But again, it’s hard to even know exactly how many of the footsoldiers have this end goal in mind, even remotely. It’s not always rational. . . . The younger left is different, more Machiavellian, more ruthless, just obsessed with wielding power and wiping out the opposition. The things we were raised to respect—the rule of law, stable families, our faith, having a functional, self-respecting country—the modern left sees as intrinsically evil. They want to destroy everything that’s good.
He who is without sin . . .
The Natural State of Mind of the Ruling Elite
“‘The 99% vs. the 1% is the modern articulation of this classic scapegoating mechanism. It is all minus one versus the one.’ The central task of controlling what Girard calls the ‘victimage mechanism,’ for ‘founders’ like him, is to deflect collective violence from themselves.” —Geoff Shullenberger, New Inquiry, quoting Peter Thiel
The number one problem of the (not entirely invisible) ruling elite is how to maintain and extend their rule. The solution-methodology to this is two-fold: perception management and crowd control.
A certain degree of (informed) paranoia is the natural state of mind of the ruling elite, because their survival to a degree depends on controlling the crowd they are ruling over, by managing their perceptions. The most important thing is to ensure the mob only ever rises up when, how, and in the direction you want it to. And most importantly, never in your direction.
This is Peter Thiel talking to Joe Rogan1:
The human situation is somehow very, very different from something like. . . an ape primate hierarchy where you. . . have an alpha male . . . and there’s some sort of natural dominance and you don’t need to have a fight to the death typically, because you know who’s the strongest and you don’t need to push it all the way. In a human context, it’s always possible for two or three guys to gang up on the alpha male. [T]hey can coordinate and they can gang up on the leader and then you have to stop them from ganging up on the leader and how do you do that?
How indeed? This is from “The Scapegoating Machine” by Geoff Shullenberger, The New Inquiry (November, 2016):
As Thiel reveals in one of the seminars that became the basis of Zero to One, he seems to understand the substitution of the scapegoat for the rival as the original “zero to one” moment of human progress. By putting a brake on the cyclical repetition of mimetic violence . . . the sacrifice of a surrogate victim allowed institutions to stabilize and establish shared symbolic orders, most fundamentally religion, but ultimately monarchy and other forms of hierarchy. Intriguingly for Thiel’s purposes, Girard once stated that “the goal of religious thinking is the same as that of technological research—namely, practical action.” Sacrificial religion is, in Thiel’s vocabulary too, a “technology” because it transcends the violence of mimetic competition and creates a regime for managing it. All this suggests that for Thiel, developers of “technology” need to accomplish something comparable to what religions did in the primordial era of humanity: the creation of superstructures that blunt the tendencies toward dissolution currently threatening global society.
As already emphasized, technology is what both the apparent “sides” in this succession theater of Radical Left vs Dissident Right rely upon as central to their methods, goals, and values; what is concealed beneath that orientation towards techno-solutions is the most ancient tech of all: that of sacrificial violence, or scapegoating.
And since each serves as the scapegoat to the other, the scapegoating machine becomes a perpetual motion machine.
(Over the Paywall: Peter Thiel, FBI informant, Thiel on Joe Rogan, Emergent New Modes of Scapegoating, the paranoid mindset of the elite, deep right as flip side of woke left, David Graeber on Trump-as-scapegoat.)